Thursday, September 9, 2010

Who’s running the show around here?

By Kate Tummarello ’11

“You don’t think about the little things,” Jen Keefe ’12 says as she runs around preparing for tonight’s Acoustic Coffeehouse performance, making sure all those little things are in place.

Keefe, the coffeehouse coordinator for the Campus Activities Board, spends nights like these juggling responsibilities. One moment she is baking cookies for the audience. The next, she is attempting to locate a temporarily misplaced cash box. Then she is onstage introducing the musicians — singer-songwriters Jason Myles Goss and Peter Bradley Adams — all before she can sit back and enjoy the show itself.

Because she has been involved with CAB since her first year at Hamilton, Keefe feels she’s been “well groomed” to handle what the job throws at her, including making sure the musicians have everything they need before and after they perform. The strangest things that she has seen on a “rider” — the term used for a performer’s prior list of requests — include ginger root and size 38 underwear. “I am never nervous,” she says.

But then, Keefe has experience juggling responsibilities. Aside from CAB events and Acoustic Coffeehouse duties, she is a member of Hamilton’s women’s ice hockey team, a tutor for the Oral Communication Center and a member of Hamilton’s sketch comedy troupe Bobby Peru.

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Between ice hockey practice, OCC training, Bobby Peru auditions and events like tonight’s, junior year is already a busy one for Keefe. But her hectic schedule hasn’t prevented her from enjoying her time at Hamilton. “This year really feels like I’m finally, really settled in,” she says. “It’s a fresh feeling.”